Phill Niblock
Phill Niblock (2 October 1933, Anderson, Indiana, USA – January 2024, New York City, New York, USA) is an artist whose work spans minimalist and experimental music, film and photography. From 1985, he served as director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music based in New York with a branch in Ghent, and curator of the foundation’s record label XI. Known for his thick, loud drones of music, Niblock’s signature sound is filled with microtones of instrumental timbres that generate many other tones in the performance space. In 2013, his diverse artistic career was the subject of a retrospective realised in partnership between Circuit (Contemporary Art Centre Lausanne) and Musée de l’Elysée. The following year Niblock was honoured with the prestigious Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award. [1]
Phill Niblock gained a degree in Economics before turning to photography and film in 1960. He shot portraits of many leading personalities in New York's jazz and avant-garde art circles in the early 1960s, ranging from Duke Ellington and Sun Ra to John Cage and Yoko Ono. Inspired by Morton Feldman's pieces containing extremely drawn-out notes, as well as by other music, he began to make music himself, and became part of the scene around the Sonic Arts Union (Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier, and others). From the early 1970s, he ran the non-commercial Experimental Intermedia organisation, which still arranges concerts in his Centre Street loft in New York City. [2]
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